Why Do People Need Self-Esteem? A Theoretical and ...

[Pages:34]Psychological Bulletin 2004, Vol. 130, No. 3, 435? 468

Copyright 2004 by the American Psychological Association 0033-2909/04/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/0033-2909.130.3.435

Why Do People Need Self-Esteem? A Theoretical and Empirical Review

Tom Pyszczynski

University of Colorado at Colorado Springs

Sheldon Solomon

Skidmore College

Jeff Schimel

University of Alberta

Jeff Greenberg

University of Arizona

Jamie Arndt

University of Missouri--Columbia

Terror management theory (TMT; J. Greenberg, T. Pyszczynski, & S. Solomon, 1986) posits that people are motivated to pursue positive self-evaluations because self-esteem provides a buffer against the omnipresent potential for anxiety engendered by the uniquely human awareness of mortality. Empirical evidence relevant to the theory is reviewed showing that high levels of self-esteem reduce anxiety and anxiety-related defensive behavior, reminders of one's mortality increase self-esteem striving and defense of self-esteem against threats in a variety of domains, high levels of self-esteem eliminate the effect of reminders of mortality on both self-esteem striving and the accessibility of death-related thoughts, and convincing people of the existence of an afterlife eliminates the effect of mortality salience on self-esteem striving. TMT is compared with other explanations for why people need self-esteem, and a critique of the most prominent of these, sociometer theory, is provided.

Everything cultural is fabricated and given meaning by the mind, a meaning that was not given by physical nature. Culture is in this sense "supernatural," and all systematizations of culture have in their end the same goal: to raise men above nature to assure them that in some ways their lives count more than merely physical things count. (Becker, 1975, p. 4)

They earn this feeling by carving out a place in nature, by building an edifice that reflects human value: a temple, a cathedral, a totem pole, a skyscraper, a family that spans three generations. The hope and belief is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay, that man and his products count. (Becker, 1973, p. 5)

The idea that people are keenly motivated to maintain high levels of self-esteem and that this motive underlies a great deal of human behavior has been a central theme in psychological theorizing, stretching from the very beginnings of scientific psychol-

Tom Pyszczynski, Department of Psychology, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs; Jeff Greenberg, Department of Psychology, University of Arizona; Sheldon Solomon, Department of Psychology, Skidmore College; Jamie Arndt, Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Missouri--Columbia; Jeff Schimel, Department of Psychology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

This research was supported by National Science Foundation Grants SBR-9312546, SBR-9601366, SBR-9601474, SBR-9731626, and SBR9729946. We thank Cathy Cox and Mark Landau for their contributions to this article.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Tom Pyszczynski, Department of Psychology, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, P.O. Box 7150, Colorado Springs, CO 80933-7150. E-mail: tpyszczy@uccs.edu

ogy to the current day (e.g., Crocker & Wolfe, 2001; Fein & Spencer, 1997; Horney, 1937; James, 1890; Kernis & Waschull, 1995; Sullivan, 1953; Tesser, 1988). Indeed, the notion that people are motivated to sustain high levels of self-esteem is so pervasive and widely accepted that most theorists use it as a postulate or paradigmatic assumption without providing justification or explanation. Such diverse forms of behavior as altruism and aggression, love and hatred, and conformity and deviance, have all been explained as ultimately rooted in the human need to see ourselves as valuable. Although there has been some recent discussion concerning whether the self-esteem motive is specific to Western culture or a universal feature of human nature (Heine, Lehman, Markus, & Kitayama, 1999) and whether high levels of selfesteem are always a good thing (Baumeister, 1998; Seligman, Reivich, Jaycox, & Gillham, 1995), the vast majority of psychological theories assume that self-esteem is a pervasive force in human motivation that is generally adaptive and associated with a broad range of desirable outcomes, in spite of the fact that the pursuit of self-esteem clearly can also lead to negative consequences and undesirable behavior.

The concept of self-esteem generally refers to a person's evaluation of, or attitude toward, him- or herself (James, 1890). Over the years, theorists have made many distinctions concerning different types of self-esteem (e.g., contingent vs. noncontingent, Crocker & Wolfe, 2001; Rogers, 1959; explicit vs. implicit, Greenwald & Farnham, 2000; Hetts & Pelham, 2001; authentic vs. false, Deci & Ryan, 1995; Horney, 1937; stable vs. unstable, Kernis & Waschull, 1995; global vs. domain specific, Dutton & Brown, 1997), and theories vary in terms of the precise dynamics through which the self-esteem motive is posited to operate. However, the themes that underlie all of these conceptions are that self-esteem

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refers to a person's evaluation of self and that people are generally motivated to maintain high levels of self-esteem and defend their self-esteem when it comes under threat.

Although some theorists advance the possibility that people can attain a healthier, more adaptive form of self-esteem that is relatively impervious to threat and does not require defense, they too acknowledge the existence and ubiquitous influence of the motive to maintain and defend positive evaluations of self (e.g., Deci & Ryan, 1995; Kernis, 2003; Rogers, 1959). The question of what makes people more or less defensive with respect to their selfevaluations is an extremely important one that is currently generating a great deal of theoretical interest and empirical research (e.g., Crocker & Wolfe, 2001; Deci & Ryan, 1995, 2000; Kernis, 2003; Kernis & Waschull, 1995; Pyszczynski, Greenberg, & Goldenberg, 2003; Schimel, Arndt, Pyszczynski, & Greenberg, 2001). However, in this article we focus on the more basic question of what psychological function self-esteem serves for the individual.

Despite the extensive use of the self-esteem motive as an explanatory concept in psychological theorizing, it was only recently that experimental psychologists turned their attention to explaining why people need self-esteem or what psychological function it serves. To our knowledge, terror management theory (TMT; Greenberg et al., 1986) was the first empirically oriented theory to address this question. Since it was first proposed in 1986, TMT has generated more than 250 separate studies, conducted in at least nine different countries, that supported hypotheses derived from it.

TMT has also generated a good deal of discussion and criticism (e.g., Boyer, 2001; Deci & Ryan, 2000; Lerner, 1997; Muraven & Baumeister, 1997; Paulhus & Trapnell, 1997; Vallacher, 1997; Wicklund, 1997). One particularly common claim is that although there is substantial evidence linking death-related thought to defense of the cultural worldview, the evidence for TMT's most basic proposition, that self-esteem serves an anxiety-buffering function, is weak and unconvincing (e.g., Leary, 1999; Leary & Baumeister, 2000; Leary & Schreindorfer, 1997). Indeed, in presenting their own sociometer theory of why people need selfesteem, Leary and Baumeister (2000) dismissed the TMT analysis of the function of self-esteem as "controversial," stating that "despite strong evidence for aspects of the theory, data do not yet support the strong argument that the function of self-esteem is to buffer existential anxiety, and a few studies have failed to support aspects of the theory" (p. 8). Unfortunately, Leary and Baumeister neglected to specifically cite or adequately describe the few studies supposedly at odds with TMT, to address the considerable body of empirical evidence pertinent to and consistent with the TMT analysis of the self-esteem motive, or to explain how their analysis could account for these findings.

Because (a) the initial impetus for the development of TMT was to address the question of why people need self-esteem, (b) a rather large number of new studies that directly address this question have been published since the last general review of the terror management literature (Greenberg, Solomon, & Pyszczynski, 1997), and (c) there have been a variety of important developments in both the self-esteem and terror management literatures since the last statement of the theory, we feel that a reconsideration of the TMT analysis of self-esteem is in order. In the present article, we review the evidence relevant to the TMT conception of the function of the self-esteem motive and compare the TMT analysis with other explanations of the function of the self-esteem motive, pay-

ing special attention to Leary and colleagues' (Leary & Baumeister, 2000; Leary, Tambor, Terdal, & Downs, 1995) sociometer theory because this is the most fully developed and widely disseminated alternative to the TMT account of self-esteem (cf. Brehm, Kassin, & Fein, 2002; Gazzaniga & Heatherton, 2003; Kendrick, Neuberg, & Cialdini, 1999; Myers, 2002).

Terror Management Theory and Research

Terror Management Theory of Self-Esteem

The crux of the terror management answer to the question, Why do people need self-esteem? is that self-esteem functions to shelter people from deeply rooted anxiety inherent in the human condition. Self-esteem is a protective shield designed to control the potential for terror that results from awareness of the horrifying possibility that we humans are merely transient animals groping to survive in a meaningless universe, destined only to die and decay. From this perspective, then, each individual human's name and identity, family and social identifications, goals and aspirations, occupation and title, are humanly created adornments draped over an animal that, in the cosmic scheme of things, may be no more significant or enduring than any individual potato, pineapple, or porcupine. But it is this elaborate drapery that provides us with the fortitude to carry on despite the uniquely human awareness of our mortal fate.

TMT was inspired by the writings of cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, who synthesized ideas from the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities to formulate what he hoped would become "a general science of man" (Becker, 1971, p. vii, 1973). TMT thus builds on ideas that reflect a long intellectual tradition, dating back at least to Plato, Aristotle, and other Greek and Roman philosophers, and continued through the thinking of Pascal, Kierkegaard, Hiedegger, Nietzsche, Freud, Rank, and many others. This tradition attempts to explain a wide array of human actions, good and evil, adaptive and maladaptive, as responses to the existential dilemma into which our species was born.

TMT starts with the proposition that the juxtaposition of a biologically rooted desire for life with the awareness of the inevitability of death (which resulted from the evolution of sophisticated cognitive abilities unique to humankind) gives rise to the potential for paralyzing terror. Our species "solved" the problem posed by the prospect of existential terror by using the same sophisticated cognitive capacities that gave rise to the awareness of death to create cultural worldviews: humanly constructed shared symbolic conceptions of reality that give meaning, order, and permanence to existence; provide a set of standards for what is valuable; and promise some form of either literal or symbolic immortality to those who believe in the cultural worldview and live up to its standards of value. Literal immortality is bestowed by the explicitly religious aspects of cultural worldviews that directly address the problem of death and promise heaven, reincarnation, or other forms of afterlife to the faithful who live by the standards and teachings of the culture. Symbolic immortality is conferred by cultural institutions that enable people to feel part of something larger, more significant, and more eternal than their own individual lives through connections and contributions to their families, nations, professions, and ideologies.

Self-esteem as a cultural construction. TMT posits that selfesteem is a sense of personal value that is obtained by believing (a)

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in the validity of one's cultural worldview and (b) that one is living up to the standards that are part of that worldview. It is the feeling that one is a valuable contributor to a meaningful universe--a sense that one's life has both meaning and value. Becker (1973) put it this way:

It doesn't matter whether the cultural hero-system is frankly magical, religious, and primitive, or secular, scientific, and civilized. It is still a mythical hero system in which people serve to earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning. (p. 5)

Thus, for TMT, self-esteem is ultimately a culturally based construction that consists of viewing oneself as living up to specific contingencies of value (cf. Crocker & Wolfe, 2001) that are derived from the culture at large but are integrated into a unique individualized worldview by each person. This implies that there is likely to be considerable variability, across both cultures and individuals, in the specific contingencies that an individual must meet to feel valuable. Whereas beating another person to a cab, loudly proclaiming one's successes, and demonstrating one's individuality and relative immunity to concerns about others might lead a typical urban American to feel valuable, the same behavior might lead to feelings of shame and dramatic drops in self-esteem for a typical Japanese urbanite, who would feel better about himor herself after stepping back to offer the cab to another person, playing down accomplishments and crediting colleagues for their role in the group effort, and blending into the group. Despite these general differences in cultural values, individuals within each culture also vary in the contingencies of value that they have internalized from the larger culture and thus in the contingencies through which they achieve self-esteem. Although the specific contingencies through which self-esteem is attained vary across cultures and individuals, the underlying need for self-esteem is posited to be a cultural universal.

The role of others in self-esteem maintenance. Although TMT conceptualizes self-esteem as resulting from one's own assessment of the extent to which one is living up to internalized cultural standards of value, other people play an important role in the process of maintaining both self-esteem and faith in the internalized version of the cultural worldview from which self-esteem is ultimately derived. Both self-esteem and faith in one's cultural worldview are maintained through a process of consensual validation (cf. Festinger, 1954; Swann, 1987). When others agree with one's conception of reality and evaluation of self, it implies that these conceptions are correct and based in external reality; when others disagree with these conceptions, it threatens to undermine this faith and confidence. From the perspective of TMT, selfesteem is a culturally derived construction that is dependent on sources of social validation, it is essentially defensive in nature, and it functions to provide a buffer against core human fears.

Development of the anxiety-buffering capacity of self-esteem. TMT follows a tradition of tracing the emergence of the anxietybuffering capacity of self-esteem through a developmental analysis that starts with the precarious situation into which the human infant is born (e.g., Becker, 1971; Bowlby, 1969/1982; Freud, 1930; Horney, 1937; Mead, 1934; Rank, 1929/1973). Consistent with Bowlby's (1969/1982) attachment theory, TMT posits that human infants are born with an innate propensity to experience and express negative affect in response to circumstances that threaten

their continued existence. Because of the newborn infant's profound immaturity and helplessness, he or she is heavily dependent on the parents for the fulfillment of basic needs and protection from threats to continued existence. Throughout the socialization process the child learns that his or her needs are fulfilled and thus anxiety is attenuated when he or she lives up to parental standards of goodness. However, when the child falls short of the parents' standards, he or she is denied that love and protection. Thus as children develop, their sense of security becomes increasingly contingent on meeting parental standards of value, which ultimately reflect the parents' internalized version of the prevailing cultural worldview. In this fashion, self-esteem acquires its anxiety-buffering properties.

In the early stages of development, affection from the parents provides this anxiety-buffering function in the absence of any conscious awareness of death or the frightening nature of this ultimate reality. The child's innate potential to respond with fear to circumstances that threaten the child's continued existence is quelled by the parents' affection before the cognitive capacities for fully understanding the core threat have developed. However, with the dawning realization of mortality and the inability of the parents to adequately protect the child from this inevitable threat, the primary basis of security shifts from the parents to a worldview ultimately derived from the deistic and secular figures and constructs of the culture at large. From the terror management perspective, then, self-esteem results from believing in and living up to internalized standards and is the feeling that "one is an object of primary value in a world of meaningful action" (Becker, 1971, p. 79).

Summary of TMT conception of self-esteem. TMT proposes that people need self-esteem because self-esteem provides a shield against a deeply rooted fear of death inherent in the human condition. Self-esteem is obtained by confident belief in a humanly constructed cultural worldview and meeting or exceeding the standards of value associated with the social role one plays within that worldview. When self-esteem is strong, this anxiety is mitigated and the person is able to go about his or her daily affairs and act effectively in the world. When self-esteem is weak or challenged, this threatens a "leakage" of this core anxiety, which instigates various forms of defensive behavior aimed at shoring up whatever aspect of one's worldview or self-evaluation has come under threat or at more generally bolstering self-worth through compensatory efforts. In addition to defending self-esteem and worldviews in the face of threats, the theory implies that because of each person's knowledge of the inevitability of death and the protection against the resultant anxiety that self-esteem and worldviews provide, people continually strive to bolster these two psychological entities. Thus, people seek self-esteem not only to escape anxiety that they are currently experiencing but also to avoid the anxiety that is inherent in their knowledge of their mortality. Even when people are not consciously thinking about death and external events are not drawing attention back to this problem, the pursuit of self-esteem and faith in one's worldview are ongoing endeavors that function to protect them from implicit knowledge of their ultimate fate.

Although we have used reminders of mortality in our research (for a review, see Greenberg et al., 1997) to help document the terror management function of self-esteem and cultural worldviews, the theory in no way implies that such reminders are necessary precursors to the ongoing pursuit of self-esteem and

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Note. Research reports are listed in the order they appear in the present article. Only the hypotheses and results that are relevant to the discussion in the present article are summarized in the table.

SE Threat interaction, F 4.20, p .05. Key pairwise: Neutral SE?threat participants

had the highest anxiety, ts 2.10, ps .05. SE Threat interaction, Fs 5.48, ps .05. Key pairwise: Neutral SE?threat participants had the highest anxiety, ts 2.38, ps .05. SE Emotionality interaction, Fs 3.87, ps .05. Key pairwise: Among neutral SE participants, emotionality information led to biased reports of emotionality to deny a short life, ts 2.00, ps .05. High SE participants reported no such bias, ts 1.00, ns.

Statistical result

worldview validation because human knowledge of the inevitability of death persists regardless of whether one is consciously thinking about this problem, much like one's knowledge of one's identity, social norms, and long-range personal goals persist and influence behavior when outside of conscious attention. Thus the proposition that people seek self-esteem because of its terror management function in no way implies that conscious thoughts of death or external reminders of mortality must be present to stimulate such pursuits.

An important question is whether self-esteem serves functions other than anxiety reduction in the ultimate service of death denial. TMT posits that, phylogenetically, the self-esteem motive emerged as a side effect of the evolution of the sophisticated intellectual abilities that made members of our species aware of their inevitable mortality. However, self-esteem undoubtedly provides other benefits for the individual as well. For example, positive evaluations may simply feel good, thus contributing to the individual's general level of positive affect, although why they make people feel good, whether it is by increasing feelings of security or through other mechanisms, requires specification. High levels of self-esteem also provide the sense of efficacy that is necessary for engagement in difficult activities and that provides resources for coping with difficulties, setbacks, and failures (Carver & Scheier, 1981, 1998). However, TMT views these as ancillary benefits of the protection against core anxiety that self-esteem provides.

Bolstered SE should reduce anxiety in response to threat.

Bolstered SE should reduce physiological arousal in anticipation of painful electric shocks.

High SE should reduce participants' tendency to deny a short life expectancy.

Hypothesis

State anxiety (Spielberger et al., 1970)

Physiological arousal (skin conductance)

Denial of a short life expectancy (level of emotionality)

Dependent variable

Participants received bogus positive vs. neutral personality feedback and then watched a threatening video about death vs. a neutral video.

Participants received bogus positive vs. neutral feedback on an intelligence test (Study 2) or on a personality test (Study 3) and then engaged in a physiological stimulation task in which they were told they would receive electric shocks vs. neutral visual stimulation.

Participants received bogus positive vs. neutral personality feedback (Study 1) or were solicited on the basis of high vs. low trait SE scores (Study 2) and were told that low vs. high emotionality is associated with an early death. Participants then completed an emotionality scale.

Context

Table 1 Direct Evidence That Self-Esteem (SE) Buffers Anxiety

Empirical Evidence of Anxiety-Buffering Properties of Self-Esteem

A large body of evidence is broadly consistent with the idea that self-esteem serves an anxiety-buffering function (for a review, see Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 1991). Self-esteem is negatively correlated with indicators of anxiety and anxiety-related problems and positively correlated with successful coping with stress and with indicators of good mental and physical health. In addition, laboratory research has shown that threats to self-esteem arouse anxiety and a wide variety of cognitive and behavioral defenses and that these defenses reduce self-reported anxiety back to baseline levels (for a review, see Arndt & Goldenberg, 2002).

In reviewing the literature concerning the function of selfesteem, we searched the psychological literature for references to the self-esteem motive, TMT, and the various alternative accounts of the function of self-esteem discussed later in the article. We later describe more specifically our search for evidence for the sociometer theory in particular. We also relied on our collective knowledge of this literature and of recent as-yet-unpublished work on these issues.

Direct evidence that self-esteem buffers anxiety. The earliest direct assessments of the TMT analysis of the self-esteem motive tested the anxiety buffer hypothesis: To the extent that self-esteem provides protection against anxiety, then increasing self-esteem should make one less prone to anxiety when later exposed to threatening material (a summary of the empirical evidence relevant to this hypothesis is presented in Table 1). In the initial test of this hypothesis, Greenberg, Solomon, et al. (1992) demonstrated that boosting self-esteem with positive feedback on a personality test led to lower levels of self-reported anxiety on the State Anxiety Inventory (Spielberger, Gorsuch, & Lushene, 1970) in response to graphic video depictions of death. Two subsequent studies showed

Greenberg, Solomon, et al. (1992, Study 1)

Greenberg, Solomon, et al. (1992, Studies 2 & 3)

Greenberg et al. (1993, Studies 1 & 2)

Report

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that both positive personality feedback and success on a supposed test of intelligence led to lower levels of physiological arousal (specifically, skin conductance) in response to the threat of painful electric shock, levels no higher than those exhibited by participants not threatened with shock. Additional support for the anxiety buffer hypothesis was provided by Greenberg et al. (1993), who demonstrated that both experimentally enhanced and dispositionally high self-esteem lead to lower levels of defensive distortions to deny one's vulnerability to an early death. Whereas in control conditions participants reported whatever level of emotionality (high or low) they had been led to believe is associated with a long life expectancy, participants with dispositionally high or experimentally enhanced self-esteem did not show this bias.

Self-esteem reduces the effect of mortality salience (MS) on worldview defense and death-thought accessibility. A large body of evidence indicates that subtle reminders of death (i.e., mortality salience; typically induced by asking participants to respond to two open-ended questions, "Please briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouse in you" and, "Jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you physically die") intensifies positive reactions to worldview validators and negative reactions to worldview threateners. For example, Greenberg, Pyszczynski, et al. (1990) had Christian participants evaluate Christian and Jewish targets who were very similar demographically except for religious affiliation. Although there were no differences in evaluation of the targets in the control condition, MS participants reported greater fondness for the Christian target and more adverse reactions to the Jewish target. For a review of MS research, see Greenberg et al. (1997). If self-esteem buffers people's concerns about death, then high self-esteem should reduce such defensive reactions to reminders of mortality and the increase in the accessibility of death-related thought that MS typically produces. A summary of evidence relevant to these hypotheses is found in Table 2.

In support of these hypotheses, Harmon-Jones et al. (1997) demonstrated that both experimentally enhanced and dispositionally high self-esteem leads to lower levels of worldview defense and death-thought accessibility in response to reminders of one's mortality. Whereas, as in many previous studies, priming participants with a reminder of their mortality led to increased defense of the cultural worldview under neutral conditions, this increased worldview defense was completely eliminated by a boost to selfesteem in the form of bogus positive feedback on a personality test. Another study demonstrated that whereas participants with moderate levels of dispositional self-esteem responded to MS with increased worldview defense, those with high levels of dispositional self-esteem did not. Arndt and Greenberg (1999) replicated this finding but also found that a self-esteem boost did not eliminate MS-induced derogation of a worldview threatener if that worldview threatener attacked the very domain upon which the prior self-esteem boost was based.

In a third study, Harmon-Jones et al. (1997, Study 3) demonstrated that experimentally enhancing self-esteem eliminated the delayed increase in death-thought accessibility, as measured by a word-stem completion task (cf. Gilbert & Hixon, 1991), that is typically found following MS treatments (e.g., Greenberg, Pyszczynski, Solomon, Simon, & Breus, 1994). This is consistent with the view that worldview defense increases as death-related thoughts become more accessible and suggests that self-esteem undermines the need to defend the worldview by keeping death-related thoughts low in accessibility.

Arndt, Greenberg, Solomon, Pyszczynski, and Simon's (1997; see also Greenberg, Arndt, Schimel, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 2001) finding that worldview defense reduces death-thought accessibility after a MS prime provides further support for this proposition. Additional evidence is provided by Mikulincer and Florian's (2002, Study 3) finding that the opportunity to engage in self-serving attributions (e.g., attributing poor performance following failure to external causes), which is a well-established self-esteem maintenance strategy (see, e.g., Pyszczynski & Greenberg, 1987), also serves to reduce death-thought accessibility in response to MS.

Contrary to what TMT would predict, Baldwin and Wesley (1996) found that the effect of MS on evaluations of worldview validators and transgressors was somewhat higher for dispositionally high than low self-esteem participants. Why high self-esteem participants showed stronger rather than weaker worldview defense, as in the Harmon-Jones et al. (1997) study, is unclear. Baldwin and Wesley suggested that this is consistent with other findings that high self-esteem individuals tend to be more defensive than those with low self-esteem.

This inconsistency in the literature suggests some caution regarding the relationship between dispositional self-esteem and responses to MS. Because of the correlational nature of studies examining relationships with chronic self-esteem, it may be that some third variable correlated with self-esteem that varied across these studies might be responsible for this divergence. Findings from studies of manipulated self-esteem, reviewed above, portray a more consistent picture of raised self-esteem reducing or eliminating the effect of MS on defensive responses.

MS increases self-esteem striving. The vast majority of terror management research has been focused on variations of the MS hypothesis, which states that, to the extent that a psychological structure provides protection against fear, reminders of the source of that fear should increase one's need for that structure. Although most studies using this paradigm have been focused on the cultural worldview component of the theory, TMT also implies that MS should lead to increased need for self-esteem and thus increased efforts to live up (or at least believe that one is living up) to the standards of value from which one's self-esteem is derived. A summary of evidence relevant to this proposition is found in Table 3.

Several early studies investigated the effects of MS on selfreported self-esteem per se, with no opportunity for behavior that would support an enhanced self-evaluation (e.g., Koole, Dechesne, & van Knippenberg, 2001; Sowards, Moniz, & Harris, 1991; several studies in our own labs).1 These studies led to inconsistent

1 In the Sowards et al. (1991) study that found no effect of MS on self-esteem, a measure of dispositional self-esteem was taken, MS was manipulated, and the same measure of dispositional self-esteem was then readministered. Besides the likelihood that the premeasure of self-esteem given moments before the postmeasure created some resistance to change in self-report and the difficulty of finding effects of situational manipulations on dispositional trait measures, this study did not include the delay and distraction that later research has shown to be necessary for reminders of mortality to affect behavior and judgments (Greenberg et al., 1994; Pyszczynski et al., 1999). Unpublished early studies that also failed to find consistent effects of MS on situational measures of self-esteem were also conducted by members of our TMT research group (Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, & Tom Pyszczynski) before we discovered the critical role played by delay and distraction in producing these effects.

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Table 2 Self-Esteem (SE) Reduces the Effect of Mortality Salience (MS) on Worldview Defense (WVD) and Death-Thought Accessibility

PYSZCZYNSKI ET AL.

Report

Context

Dependent variable

Hypothesis

Statistical result

Harmon-Jones et al. (1997, Study 1)

Harmon-Jones et al. (1997, Study 2)

Harmon-Jones et al. (1997, Study 3)

Arndt & Greenberg (1999)

Arndt et al. (1997, Study 3)

Greenberg et al. (2001)

Mikulincer & Florian (2002, Study 3)

Participants received bogus positive vs. neutral personality feedback, wrote about their mortality vs. a neutral topic (TV), and then evaluated a pro- vs. an anti-American essay author.

Participants with high vs. moderate trait SE (Rosenberg, 1965) were solicited for the study. Participants wrote about their mortality vs. a neutral topic (TV) and then evaluated a pro- vs. anti-American essay.

Participants received bogus positive vs. neutral personality feedback, wrote about their mortality vs. a neutral topic (TV) and then completed a death accessibility (DA) measure immediately vs. after a delay.

Participants received bogus positive vs. neutral personality feedback and bogus positive vs. neutral feedback about their college major. Participants were then reminded of their mortality vs. a control topic (dental pain) and then evaluated a target who criticized the United States and a target who criticized their major.

Participants were reminded of their mortality vs. a control topic (taking an exam) and then evaluated pro vs. anti-American essays. An additional group of participants was reminded of their mortality and not allowed to evaluate the essays.

Conceptual replication of Arndt et al. (1997, Study 3) using dental pain as the control topic. An additional condition was added: MS?defend under high cognitive load.

Participants were reminded of their mortality vs. watching TV and then received failure feedback on a concept formation task. Participants then were given the opportunity to make SSA about their performance.

WVD (difference score reflecting preference for pro- vs. antiAmerican author)

WVD (difference score reflecting preference for pro- vs. antiAmerican author)

DA (word fragment completions)

WVD#1: evaluation of antiAmerican target; WVD#2: evaluation of antimajor target

DA (word fragment completions)

DA (word fragment completions) DA (word fragment completions)

Experimentally bolstered SE should reduce WVD in response to MS.

Higher levels of trait SE should reduce WVD in response to MS.

Higher levels of bolstered SE should reduce the delayed increase in DA following MS.

1. High SE boost should reduce WVD#1 following MS.

2. Major SE boost should raise WVD#2 following MS.

MS should lead to high DA when participants are not allowed to engage in WVD.

MS should lead to high DA when participants are not allowed to engage in WVD.

MS should lead to higher DA when participants are not allowed to make SSA.

SE MS interaction, F 4.29, p .05. Key pairwise: High SE reduced WVD

following MS relative to neutral SE, t 2.93, p .05.

SE MS interaction, F 4.36, p .05. Key pairwise: High trait SE participants

had lower WVD following MS than moderate SE participants, ts 1.00, ns. Among moderate SE participants, MS led to higher WVD than control, ts 2.87, ps .01. Among high SE participants, there was no difference between MS vs. control, ts 1.00. SE MS Time interaction, F 7.55, p .01. Key pairwise: On the delayed DA measure, high SE reduced DA following MS relative to neutral SE, t 5.31, p .01. No pairwise comparisons on the immediate DA measure were significant, ts 1.00. WVD#1: SE MS interaction, F 14.66, p .01. Key pairwise: Neutral SE?MS participants had the highest WVD#1, ts 4.62, ps .01. WVD#2: Major Boost MS interaction, F 5.32, p .03. Key pairwise: Major SE boost?MS participants had the highest WVD#2, ts 2.18, ps .05. Planned contrasts: MS?no defend participants had higher DA than MS? defend and control?defend participants, t 4.84, p .01. MS?defend vs. control?defend participants did not differ, t 1.00, ns. Significant treatment effect, F 5.28, p .01. Key pairwise: MS?no defend participants had the highest DA, ts 2.61, ps .05. MS Opportunity to Make SSA, F 5.14, p .05. Simple effects: When participants were not allowed to make SSA, MS led to higher DA than TV, F 6.63, p .01. When participants were allowed to make SSA, MS led to lower DA than TV, F 4.43, p .05.

WHY DO PEOPLE NEED SELF-ESTEEM?

441

Note. Research reports are listed in the order they appear in the present article. Only the hypotheses and results that are relevant to the discussion in the present article are summarized in the table. Unless otherwise specified, the MS inductions in the above studies were composed of two open-ended questions about death (e.g., Greenberg, Simon, et al., 1992). SSA self-serving attributions.

Statistical result MS SE interaction, F 7.70, p .01. Simple effects: MS led high SE participants

to give more polarized ratings of the positive and negative targets, F 4.79, p .05. MS led low SE participants to marginally lower polarized ratings of the positive and negative targets, F 2.80, p .10. There was also a nonsignificant Meaninglessness SE interaction, F 1.00.

Hypothesis 1. MS should lead to more

polarized reactions to the targets for high SE participants. 2. MS should lead to less polarized reactions to the targets for low SE participants.

Dependent variable Likeability and evaluations of the

targets. A polarization score was computed by subtracting the ratings of the negative target from the positive target.

results. However, Pyszczynski and Greenberg (1987) have argued elsewhere (see also Festinger, 1957; Kruglanski, 1981; Kunda, 1990) that people are not free to believe just anything they wish but must be able to generate a plausible set of evidence that enables them to maintain an illusion of objectivity about their beliefs. This suggests that MS would lead to greater efforts to convince oneself of one's personal value, as reflected by greater efforts to live up to cultural standards, greater distress when violating them, or greater biases in one's interpretation of specific self-relevant information. The evidence to date strongly supports these propositions.

Greenberg, Simon, Pyszczynski, Solomon, and Chatel (1992) provided the first evidence suggesting that MS increases selfesteem striving by demonstrating that MS led political liberals, who are committed to the value of tolerance, to respond more favorably to someone who challenged their worldviews. A follow-up study demonstrated this effect among a general sample of students, but only after priming them with the value of tolerance. Thus MS led to increased efforts to live up to the value of tolerance both among those who dispositionally placed great importance on this value and among those for whom the salience of this value was temporarily increased. Conceptually similar research has found that whereas Australian participants with low self-esteem respond to reminders of mortality by becoming more individualistic in their behavior, Japanese participants with low self-esteem respond to MS by becoming less individualistic in their behavior (Kashima, Halloran, Yuki, & Kashima, 2003). This work shows that MS effects depend on the prescribed values of the particular culture and that these effects on self-esteem striving occur in collectivistic as well as individualistic cultures. Of course, in cultures, such as the United States, that emphasize individualism and capitalism, materialism and financial success are highly valued as reflections of worth. Accordingly, studies have found that MS increases the appeal of high-status items (e.g., a Lexus automobile vs. a Geo-Metro automobile; Mandel & Heine, 1999; see also Heine, Harihara, & Niiya, 2002), financial aspiration, and greed (Kasser & Sheldon, 2000).

More direct behavioral evidence of MS increasing self-esteem striving was subsequently provided by a series of studies by Taubman Ben-Ari, Florian, and Mikulincer (1999). In these studies conducted on Israeli soldiers, MS increased risky driving behavior (assessed through both self-reports and on a driving simulator) among those participants who valued their driving ability as a source of self-esteem. Taubman Ben-Ari et al. also hypothesized that after MS, a boost to self-esteem would eliminate the need to demonstrate driving skill through risky driving, and that is precisely what they found. In addition to providing evidence that MS increases self-esteem striving, this research provides evidence for an ironic effect: Even risky behavior, which could be a threat to one's continued existence, can be increased by reminders of death if that behavior is a source of self-esteem. More recent studies by Hirschberger, Florian, Mikulincer, Goldenberg, and Pyszczynski (2002) replicated these findings with a measure of the general appeal of a wide range of risky behavior.

Other research demonstrates that reminders of death can also promote self-esteem striving in health-related domains (see Arndt, Schimel, & Goldenberg, 2003) when such domains represent important contingencies of self-worth (cf. Crocker & Wolfe, 2001). This work is derived from the dual defense model of conscious and

Context Canadian participants who were high vs. low

on trait SE read passages that reminded them of their mortality and the meaninglessness of life vs. their mortality with no reference to meaninglessness vs. meaninglessness without reference to death vs. no passage (control). Participants then evaluated several targets that were worldview validators vs. transgressors.

Report Baldwin & Wesley

(1996)

Table 2 (continued )

442

Table 3 Mortality Salience (MS) Increases Self-Esteem Striving

PYSZCZYNSKI ET AL.

Report

Context

Dependent variable (DV)

Hypothesis

Statistical result

Greenberg, Simon, et al. (1992, Study 1)

Greenberg, Simon, et al. (1992, Study 2)

Heine et al. (2002)

Mandel & Heine (1999)

Kasser & Sheldon (2000, Study 1)

Kasser & Sheldon (2000, Study 2)

Highly conservative vs. highly liberal Liking of the similar and dissimilar MS should lead conservatives to like MS Political Orientation Similarity of Target

participants were reminded of their target

similar over dissimilar targets. MS interaction, F 10.11, p .01.

mortality vs. a neutral topic (TV).

should not affect liberals' liking Key pairwise: Conservative participants liked the

Participants then evaluated a liberal

for similar and dissimilar targets. similar target and disliked the dissimilar target

and conservative target.

under MS, both ts 2.04, ps .05. Liberal

participants liked the dissimilar target slightly

more following MS, t 1.81, p .08.

Participants were either primed with Evaluation of the pro- and anti- Priming tolerance should eliminate MS Tolerance Prime Target interaction, F

the value of tolerance or not and

American essay

the usual MS effect of liking for

4.26, p .05.

then were reminded of their

the pro- vs. anti-American essay. Key pairwise: Among no prime participants, MS

mortality vs. a control topic (TV).

decreased liking for the anti-American essay, t

Participants then evaluated a pro-

4.49, p .01. Among MS participants, the

and anti-American essay.

tolerance prime increased liking of the anti-

American essay relative to no prime, t 2.33,

p .05.

Japanese participants at the University Evaluation of anti-Japan essay;

MS should lead Japanese

Significant t test on anti-Japan essay, t 4.86, p

of Tokyo were reminded of their

intentions to purchase each

participants to less liking of the

.04, indicating that MS led to more negative

mortality vs. taking an exam,

product

anti-Japan essay and increase

evaluations of the essay. Nonsignificant t test

evaluated an anti-Japan essay, and

purchase intentions of high-status on high-status products essay, t 1.00, ns.

then rated several high- vs. low-

products vs. low-status products. Marginally significant t test on low-status

status products after viewing ads

products, t 3.49, p .07, indicating that MS

for these products.

led to lower purchase intentions for the low-

status products.

Participants were reminded of their Intentions to purchase each product MS should lead participants to

MS Product Status interaction, F 5.54, p

mortality (using the Fear of Death

higher purchase intentions of the .01.

Scale; Boyar, 1964) vs. similar

high-status products.

Cell means: MS?high status 4.09; MS?low

questions about depressive

status 3.63; control?high status 3.48;

symptoms and then rated high- and

control?low status 3.93.

low-status products after viewing

ads for these products.

Participants were reminded of their 3 DVs: (a) overall financial worth MS should lead participants to

Significant t test on overall financial worth, t

mortality vs. a neutral topic

(dollar estimates of salary, worth overestimate their future financial 1.99, p .05, indicating that MS led

(listening to music) and then

of home, investments, and travel worth.

participants to higher estimates of future worth.

answered several questions about

allowance); (b) pleasure

Significant t test on pleasure spending, t

their expected financial success 15 spending (clothing,

2.30, p .02, indicating that MS led

years in the future.

entertainment, & leisure

participants to higher ratings of pleasure

activities); and (c) possessions

spending. Nonsignificant t test on possessions, t

(worth of vehicles and household

0.13.

goods)

Participants were reminded of their 3 DVs: (a) greed (rate their desire MS should lead participants to bid to Significant t test on participants actual bid, t

mortality vs. a neutral topic

to profit over other companies), harvest a larger portion of the

2.13, p .04, indicating that MS led

(listening to music) and then

(b) fear (rate how much forest

forest. No hypothesis regarding

participants to higher bids. Significant t test on

participated in a forest management other companies would cut), and greed vs. fear.

greed, t 2.6, p .01, indicating that MS led

game in which they were to

(c) actual bid (acreage of forest

participants to report higher greed.

imagine competing against three

they would harvest)

Nonsignificant t test on fear, t 0.83, p .41.

other forestry companies to harvest

timber. Participants were put in the

commons dilemma in which higher

bids could wipe out the forest.

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